MAGA’s Iran War Meltdown (and Micropenis)

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which is where Alex Pretty was executed by Ice and Border Patrol. That is not a headline that is a human life and it is all happening right now. Do you worry about your own safety being involved in all this? Yes but it doesn't really feel like there's another option you know. And of course they use a five year old child as bait and of course they're doing all these horrible bad things because they don't know what they're doing. They've been told that they're going to

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I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben you've been enjoying the world baseball classic you look like a WPC guy. I'm a WPC guy and I've enjoyed it too because I'm a metspan and Juan Soto was playing for the Dominican Republic and he was I was struck that some of these guys seem like they're playing a little harder in the WPC and they do during the which I appreciate. I mean you're playing for your country. I love all the random American players who are playing for like teen Italy

or whatever and they're just like like they're just happy to be there. They just grab some guy with a tie name and put him on. Yeah like if you're your name ends with a value you're on this squad. I was at a sushi place Japanese place on like Saturday night and everyone working there was Japanese. Everyone every customer except for Hannah and I were Japanese and the Japan

“game was on and people were riveted and it was really awesome because I think show hey went”

yard and like the first inning and was just like playing his balls off and I don't know it was just very fun and like got me excited for baseball season for the Dodgers in particular.

Well it's kind of cool to see baseball which has always had an international dimension but

it kind of like basketball to become this global sport that we used to think it was a very American sport but if you look at the rosters it's most of the guys tend to be from somewhere else. Yeah it's cool. I like that. It is cool especially like the growth of these Japanese players. Let me show you a tonneys like maybe the best player ever in history. When you go to a Dodgers game I know if you go but you'll I mean a chunk of the fans at Dodger Stadium or Japanese and some

them are Japanese Americans but you get a sense that there's literally people to travel from Japan to come see Shoe at Dodgers Stadium. And like rightly so it's like a one-to-the-generation opportunity to watch this guy play baseball. Very fun. Less fun topics today. We're going to cover a lot of stuff from Iran. Actually we're going to do our best at fun with it because there's some kind of magma media crack-up things that are very interesting and entertaining. So the gist is the

straightaway moves as close. The price of gas is up. No US allies will help Donald Trump solve the problem he's created and despite ongoing bombing and further assassinations at top Iranian political leaders. It seems like we are now further away from this conflict ending

We're also going to talk about the resignation that be top Trump National Security Official

“named Joe Kent. And while he is a deeply flawed kind of individual messenger which will explain”

his comments are very stark and could be a sign of a broader kind of intro magma crack-up that we should watch. Then I'm going to get Ben's reaction to this viral op-ed that's making the case that the Iran war is actually going well. This thing has gone super viral in T.C. We're going to cover these reports that the Supreme Leader of Iran is gay. Some, like I said, massive infighting in the media world and then the latest from Trump's slow motion regime change attempt

in Cuba and then will offer our own Kennedy Center honors to honor its former leader, Mr. Rickornell. So happy trails to Rick. Feel bad for that guy. And then, yeah, tell me I did it. I do not agree with him. Yeah, that's true. I did the interview with Kim Gattis who's been on before. She's a great journalist and writer and analyst who's based in Beirut. She'd actually

just left Beirut. But yeah, did she have to evacuate? No, she had some pre-plan travel because she's coming to teach her class in the United States, but she updated us on the situation in Lebanon. What it's like to be there, the scale of the displacement, the scale of the bombing, the regional dynamics, what Israel's intentions may be, how much of certain Lebanon they might try to kind of hold or create as a buffer zone. What the Lebanese political dynamic is a

combination of frustration with both Hezbollah and Israel and kind of the sense of being caught in

middle things. So good Lebanon's been overlooked in this war, but it's a huge, I mean, a million

people are displaced. It's a fifth of the population. So good time to spend some extra space with Kim on that. Yeah, we decided to put that conversation in the interview because Kim is a genuine expert in just left Beirut, as you said. But in like, you know, on Earth, too, where there's only the war in Lebanon and not a war in Iran, like that's the entire show today. You know, like this, the scale of what's happening there is stunning. Her point, which I think is sobering, is that

“you have to almost go all the way back to the early 1980s when Israel occupied Southern Lebanon”

to get at this scale of war. And there've been a lot of war since then. So this, yeah, this is not a small military operation. Like 800,000 people have been displaced, to be just unimaginable. So as we've discussed, you know, there's been some really great coverage of the war. There's also been a lot of like terrible, credulous, recursation of lies from the Trump White House. And then this kind of like endless post 9/11 framing where we are told that the way to support our troops

is to constantly send them to war for as long as possible and not question why. So we hear quicker media. We promised to be the opposite of that. We're going to do tough substantive coverage of the war neuron and all the other many places, Trump is bombing. So there's two ways that you can

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polling news. Much more, that's Crooked.com/Friends to learn more. And listen to thank you guys for watching. Especially all the bonus episodes. We've been doing on Pottae of the World. We really love doing it. And the fact that you watch means a lot to us. Appreciate it. Yeah, it is a lot to, so we could do it every day. Unfortunately. Yeah, a lot of stuff to cover. All right. And so a lot has happened since we talked last week, just to tick through some of the

major updates and then we'll hear from our president. So the casualty count, unfortunately, keeps going up. 13 US service members are dead since the war started. 200 have been hurt or wounded. So six of the 13 died last week. There was some sort of mid-air collision between two KC-135 refueling planes over Western Iraq. I feel like we don't really know the full story there. I

feel like we may never because the Pentagon is just hiding the ball on a lot of this stuff. But

really awful. In Iran, nearly 1500 Iranians have been reported dead about 18,500 have been injured according to Al Jazeera. On Tuesday morning, we learned that Ali Lajani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and the effective leader of the regime has been killed in Israeli air strike. The head of the Bessiege militia is also dead. There was also some big news on Tuesday when a top Trump aide named Joe Kent resigned saying, quote, "I cannot in good

And it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and it's powerful American

lobby and quotes. So again, we'll talk more later in the show. We'll go deep on who Kent is, why he's a flawed messenger here and some of the really weird shit in this letter, especially that Israel. But it is, it does seem like a sign that the cracks in the mega world are widening fast over this war. But more importantly, most importantly for Iran than the straight-of-form moves is still closed. NATO countries and nearly every other country, they refuse to, they've rebuffed

Trump's request to join this like ad hoc kind of like naval coalition to escort ships through the straight-of-form moves. Trump is not at all mad about it. Here's a supercut of what Trump and his team, if I had to say about Iran, the straight-of-her-mooze, NATO, and a lot more over the last couple of days. Let's watch. The straight-of-form moves are famous, wonderful, beautiful place.

I knew about the straight that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, predicted all of this stuff. Why can't the U.S. just immediately reopen the straight-of-form

moves? Well, we could, but it takes two to tango. We have to get people to take their billion dollar

“ship and, you know, drive it up. The only thing prohibiting transit in the straights right now”

is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that. We have 45,000 troops in Japan. We have 45,000 troops in South Korea. We have 45,000, and 50,000 troops in Germany. We defend all these countries, and then gather your minds, sweepers, and they say, "Well, we'll be possible for us not to get involved." I've long said that, you know, I wonder whether or not NATO would ever be there for us.

So this was a great test, because we don't need them, but they should have been there. We didn't have to be there for Ukraine. You know, it's interesting. I'm almost doing it. In some cases, not because we need them, but because I want to find out how they react. You look back at the case, didn't we? We should be there at all. We don't need it. We have a lot of oil. You're ready in regime, it's both starting to use. If you put boots on the ground in Iran,

it will be another Vietnam. Are you afraid of that? No, I'm not afraid of. I'm really not afraid of anything.

“I love that Pete Hexeth quotes so much. The only thing blocking the straightive”

for moves is Iran blocking the straightive for moves. Thank you, Pete. Yes. You have identified the problem. Then what do you make of Trump? I mean, Kyrus, what do you think about any of that? But what do you make of him folding all of this into this old fight with NATO? Like, why ask for help from NATO countries if you don't need it? Why go public with the ask? Before getting a private yes, when you know it, it'll just kind of like make you look isolated and

stupid. Maybe we're thinking about it more than he ever did, but what's your take? I don't feel reassured by that super cut. And I don't think there's any super cut that could have been put together that I'm sure do you? Because you get no sense of the political objectives of the war from that, the straight of Hormuz is closed because Donald Trump launched the war. And for him to turn on allies like this, this quickly, is both completely insane, but also

very much a situation where the chickens are coming home to roost. So first of all, the idea that

these countries should get involved and literally get in harm's way to support a war of choice, an illegal war of choice that Donald Trump launched without even consulting any of them is absolutely madness. I mean, it reminded me a little bit Tommy to play back one of the hits of how out of sorts the Bush administration got when France and Germany refused to join the war in

“Iraq. But at least that was like they went over there. They made the case. They said, you should”

join us for these reasons. And then they were told, no, this is we are going to surprise you by launching a massive war in the Middle East that is going to compromise all of your energy supplies. Right. Europe is already paying more than Americans are for higher fuel prices. And then say, oh, and you better send down some troops to support me. Of course, they're not going to do that. Nor should they. I wouldn't do that if I were them. And for him to then kind of go back and play

the hits of, well, we defend you and you don't defend us. First of all, the chickens are coming home to roost in the sense that if you treat your allies like shit for the first year plus of your administration, if you threaten to invade European territory in Greenland, if you put tariffs on people, if you consistently insult them, if you back far right parties in their countries and say you're going to quote cultivate resistance in Europe, which is what they said in our scrawny strategy,

you should not be surprised that there's not exactly a deep reservoir of goodwill to draw apart. And those of us who've been saying that you need allies and if you treat them like garbage, you're going to ultimately harm American interests. Well, this is part of what we're talking about.

I mean, this is the other thing is this fundamental misunderstanding in the war, what's needed in the straight of four moves is not like a few extra German mind sweepers, it's for their to not be a war, right? And so it doesn't even really matter if they kick in some ships. You're not going to restart commerce as long as Iran is disrupting that commerce, unless you kill every last single Iranian, which is, you know, horrible thing to think about. And so

I just think that he's flailing, he's going day to day and he's refusing to see the consequences of the very war that he started. Yeah, I mean, you're pointing about pissing off all your allies, this is the predictable outcome and predicted outcome. The he keeps saying they're that like, you know, no one predicted all these bad things that are going wrong now and Iran, but everyone predicted these things is the most obvious things. And to your point about just like we need a

couple of mind sweepers, it's not that simple. Like that's a very important one. Just like just

“for context or folks, so the straightaway moves, it's the only way in and out of the Persian Gulf,”

it's only 21 miles wide at its nearest point and you got Iran on one side and Oman on the other. And as we're learning, this choke point gives Iran a tremendous amount of leverage because they

can cut off the flow of oil and gas on ships as well as many other commodities. One third of the

world's fertilizer goes through the straight, one third of the world's helium supply goes through the straight sulfur like the list goes on and on. And so Iran can block the flow of those ships in a bunch of ways. They can place naval mines and shipping channels, which they reportedly done although Trump keeps denying that they've done it. They can attack ships with missiles and drones as of this recording, 16 ships have been attacked. They can also just threaten to attack ships.

And that creates understandable fear from shipping companies and the price of insurance goes up and it's like a de facto blockade. So that is all created what the international energy agency is

“calling, quote, the largest supply disruption in history. And at the moment, it's not a total”

stoppage of oil and gas out of the Middle East. Like Iran is letting some ships through they're letting their own ships out. There's some like ships connected to China that have gotten out. And then both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have pipelines they can use to move oil and gas. But Iran is also now targeting those pipelines with drones and missile attacks. So the status quo is the prices have gone way up. And if this goes on much longer, it could permanently impact

the oil production from wells in the region, which leads you to this idea of this naval escort for the ships. And the shipping news publication Lloyds list ran the numbers on the feasibility of naval escorts. They said that escorts would only get 10% of normal traffic through and that a basic naval escort operation would need between 8 to 10 destroyers to protect convoyes between 5 to 10 commercial vessels in each transit. And then I saw there was a retired Air Force

general who had specifically been asked to study how to defend the state of her moves back in the

“day. And he told the New York Times that the only way to truly control the state would be to take”

and hold the Iranian territory border. Exactly. So that's a ground invasion. And I haven't seen the Trump administration float that as an option. But man was this a failure of planning if they didn't realize that that's kind of like the escalation letter here.

No, and in any Iran war game, one of the first things Iranians do is close the straight

of our moves. Like this is no mystery to anybody. And what Trump keeps trying to do and I think things have finally caught up to him. You know, we've talked in the past about how you do these things, like Venezuela or the 12-day war, and he'd kind of get out before the consequences could really sink in. And this is the one that caught up to him, because this is of a much larger scale, because it's essentially threatened the Iranian regime. And if they feel existentially threatened,

they are going to bear a lot of costs to wreak havoc on everybody else and to make the price of this war so high that they won't be attacked again. That's clearly what they're doing. And whatever you think of the Iranian regime, and there's plenty of bad things to say about the, if you look at Iran generally, well, first of all, the regime, they went through the Iran Iraq war for nearly a decade, where they lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.

Like they have never mind the fact that Iran as a civilization has been there thousands of years.

Like these are not people that are just going to capitulate under a few weeks of bombing. They're going to do this. They're going to continue to threaten the straight, and they're going to try to control that straight. That's the way that they can in their minds win the war. And they win by not losing. Yeah, they win by not losing. The regime survives. They've demonstrated the leverage they have because of the straight. And that's it. And that's

their path to winning by not losing. And Trump, you know, and a lot of these other things is he creates a mess. And then he tries to give himself credit for solving the problem that he created.

I'm going to build this great coalition to open the straight. And he's looking over your

“left shoulders, right shoulder, and nobody's there except Israel. And again, this is what it's like.”

This is what it feels like to be in a world in which you're not only launching a war with no idea of what you're doing, but you also have no friends who are going to bail you out. Yeah. A couple quick military and security updates. And then a couple of diplomatic or Iran based updates to close this section out. So last week, the US bombed Cargueland, which is this tiny little island that we've talked about before. It's 15 miles off the coast of Iran.

90% of Iran's oil and gas goes through it for export. Trump, they just had the military bomb military installations on Cargueland, not the oil and gas infrastructure, which again is fuel speculation that the US or Israel might try to invade an occupied Cargueland. But Trump did till NBC, you might have Cargueland bombed again, quote, "just for fun." So that's cool. Ben also last week, there was a fire on the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier that apparently now we learned

took 30 hours to put out. A dozens of sailors have smoke inhalation injuries, more than 600 sailors and crew members lost their beds and are now sleeping on like tables. I'm on the floor and in bunks. A lot of them can't do laundry anymore. And this hardship is coming in the tenth month of deployment for this ship. They sound like these guys are going to get extended until May. And in April, their deployment will be the longest ever for a post of Vietnam carrier. So this

is just like, it's a brutal and under-discuss hardship for the individuals, the men and women on this

boat. And then finally, along those same lines, Ben, I don't know if you saw the videos that were

coming out last night from Baghdad of all these drone attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad, not like the sea ram, the missile, the basically the machine gun that fires at these drones automatically and defends the Baghdad embassy from, you know, drone attacks. But one hit and it looks just absolutely fucking terrifying because these diplomats are getting attacked by she-a-backed militias that are supported by Iran. So I mean, security situation is getting worse

“and not better. I think there's something really important that we have to flag for our viewers and”

listeners, which is something you mentioned earlier when you talked about the casualties, which is I've lived through multiple wars. I was, you know, we were in government for eight years, but also just watching, you know, the Bush years and the post of familiars,

I've never felt like I was getting less information from the US government and information that

was clearly incomplete and even a time seemingly dishonest. So first of all, there's been very little transparency about these casualties. The only time we really seem to learn something specific is when somebody dies because you can't, you know, conceal that. I don't know how those planes crashed. I don't know the state of these wounded troops, like where they're wounded and how, how severe those wounds are. The damage you talk about, it feels like there's this

tide of censorship. So we already know that Israel is trying to suppress video getting out of the tax that are hitting Israel. We know that the UAE is prosecuting people who post videos online of Dubai being hit. Now, you could see why they want to do that. The idea of Dubai is this place,

for influencers and tourists, that's part of their economic model. But the reality is,

“let's just take the US side of this. Remember the Saudi embassy fire. The US embassy in Saudi”

was hit. I don't know how badly it was damaged. I don't know how badly the embassy and Baghdad's been damaged. We've had military installations hit in Bahrain. I don't know how badly they're damaged. It feels like we have no idea what damage is being sustained. Like, so just to take, is this billions of dollars? Like, we're going to, when are we going to be able to reopen embassies? How much is going to cost to rebuild things that have been broken? We are not being told

by our own government. Cost that we, as taxpayers, are going to have to pay. And nor can we evaluate how much Iran is able to hit things because we're not being told what they're hitting. Yeah. Right. Like, you get it's crazy, Tommy. Like, you know what this is like. You're piecing together stuff from, you know, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera and it's this video on social media. Right. There's no damage assessment coming from the United States government. And that's not normal.

And the fact that you can't trust anything Pete Hegg says says is not normal. I'm disappointed that the military doesn't feel like it's very transparent about all the targets it bombs and Iran. It's not transparent about the damage that we've taken or the casualties that we've taken. And this is a huge deal that hasn't got a lot of attention yet. Yeah. I totally agree with that. It seems like they're really trying to evade any kind of ability. And also, like Pete Hegg's

make him look good in photos. Like, it's just a fucking joke. Also, Ben, as I mentioned at the top,

so these railies and outs on Tuesday morning that they killed a top Iranian political year name. Oh, we are Johnny. One Iran expert I was talking to today described. Large Johnny to me is both like up hardline, but a pragmatic operator. Like during the Obama years, he was Speaker of Parliament. He was considered a pragmatist, but he he seems to have hardened over time as the entire system and apparatus hardened and built kind of like what was described to me is mafia like economic links with the IRGC. Now, I was talking to another source who was telling me that

large Johnny was the interlocutor for US talks. At this moment, right before his death, someone this person told me that specifically he was talking with Steve Wickoff. Now, I can't confirm that.

But if it's true, it would be the latest instance of Israel killing a possible interlocutor in the

“Iranian system, who could help find an off-ramp to end the war. And, you know, my guess is the truth is”

probably less complicated than that. Like, I know that Netyahu is, you know, full send on regime change and regime decapitation and that kind of component of this military campaign. And they're clearly not coordinating with the US as evidence by Trump saying things to journalists like, well, all of people we thought, you know, could take over for the Supreme Leader now dead. Dead? But I mean, it seems like this guy was, you know, I've seen Israeli military analysts say he was the number one target

after Hamanay and, you know, now it was dead. Oh, look, this is also very important. And look,

I was very familiar with our Johnny. He was a very familiar figure in the Obama years. He like

a Rachi the Foreign Minister. He's a very sophisticated person, doesn't mean I'm not saying I grew this politics, right? But he was an operator and he straddled the two, they're very few figures in Iranian politics who can kind of straddle the IRGC hardline and the kind of more moderate political leadership, people like a Rachi, the current Foreign Minister, Javad Zarifah, the past Foreign Minister.

“And that's why he was often an interlocutor for kind of back channel discussions, killing him,”

guarantees that he will be replaced by a more hardline person chosen by the IRGC. And this is the fallacy of the Israeli strategy, right? If Al-Aqamani had died of natural causes in a year or two, I don't think his son, who's a hardliner, would have been the most likely candidate to become Supreme Leader that used to be seen as a less likely outcome that the hardliners wanted, because of the natural pressures inside that system to move into somewhat different direction.

By killing Hamanay, they got a harder line replaced in Hamanay. Now by killing Laura Johnny, they're going to get a harder line replacement to Laura Johnny. This is not how you actually get a better future for Iran. It's how you ensure that the hardest line people. And a lot of us have said for a long time, if you decapitate the political leadership of this regime, you're going to be left with the military, the IRGC, the most hardline people as the strongest

power, because in a vacuum, the vacuum goes to the people with guns and resources. And that's

“the IRGC. If I was cynical, I would say that maybe that's what Israel wants. Maybe they want”

to kind of clear out any potential political leadership that could be in any kind of negotiation with the United States, or the outside world, and that offers anything other than a binary choice, the IRGC, or some kind of violent overthrow of the government, or just a civil war. And again, it's hard for me to look at the strategy and see any pathway from assassinating and decapitating the regime to democracy. It feels far more like a strategy of trying to implode Iran and have

it be in a state of violent chaos and civil conflict. Israel doesn't come out and say that's their objective, but you have had some Israeli analysts, including some people on background saying that's an objective that they would be happy with, or they'd be comfortable with. And so I think here Tommy, we see the at what's at odds between the US and Iran, because if the US strategy is as stated now recently, let's degrade all their capabilities and then negotiate. By killing

Lerjani, you're making that far less likely. And so this feels like an Israeli strategy at odds with American strategy. And they also know that Trump could wake up tomorrow and just decide he wants to end the war and he needs a phone number to call. And at some point he's just going to run out of numbers to call. One last quick thing, Ben, the Washington Post reported that while we've seen Israeli Prime Minister BB Netanyahu repeatedly tell protesters to rise up to take their government,

you know, almost seem to blame them for not having done it yet. Israeli officials are privately telling US diplomats that they believe the protesters would get slaughtered. Now that is obvious. But the fact that they would make those calls and then say that in private to the US

the worst possible messenger for these regime change, the little videos he puts out. It's so cynical because they're using the understandable hatred of the regime to try to appear like they're doing this for some values proposition and they're not. Like BB Netanyahu is no interest in democracy and Iran or he could care. Resapalavi was a useful idiot to him. You know, when they were trying to kind of create this groundswell of support for something that people didn't

“support. And I think what you're seeing now is that there's been this effort for 25 years in this”

country to make opposition to the war feel like it's not supportive of the troops and not supportive of the people we're trying to corner what help inside these countries. Right? So if you don't support the war in Iran, you don't support funding it, you don't support the troops and you somehow are turning your back on the Iranian people. No, we have to take that back and we've already talked about why we shouldn't fund this war, but we shouldn't give into the lie that bombing a country

is somehow intended to be helping those people. You're setting Iran back a generation with a scale of destruction that we're seeing in Iran and you're certainly not doing anything that feels designed to lead to some kind of peaceful transition to a different kind of regime. No, it feels like we are all science point descalation. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, but as you all know, November is going to decide the control of Congress and the Trump keeps the Republican

trifecta and can evade all accountability. Weeding back the house is the fastest way to put a real

“check on Trump's abuses and the Republicans enabling him. It's time to go on offense. So we,”

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life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 percent at select quote.com/world. Save more than 50 percent on term life insurance at select quote.com/world. Go today to get started select quote.com/world. Okay, let's talk about the the resignation of this top trump official named Joe Kent. So Kent was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center or NCTC. That is a very big job. You report to the Director of National Intelligence so it tells you gathered in this case,

but like you have a huge counterterrorism responsibility and you have a seat at the table in like the biggest policy meetings you often do a laydown of kind of like the threat. So he was a very senior person in his resignation letter to trump Kent says the following things. These are quotes. Quote, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. High ranking Israeli officials and

influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America first platform and showed pro war sentiment to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat

“to the United States and you should strike now. There was a clear path to victory. This was a lie”

and is the same tactic that Israel used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war. Okay, so that's the end of quoting. Let's so unpack those claims a bit and then contextualize

who Kent is. So the first claim there to me then is by far the most important point which is

Kent had access in that role to the crown jewels of American intelligence and if he says Iran posed no imminent threat that is very significant and I think we should believe him. Then we get to the Israel bucket of claims and I think it gets a lot more complicated. So clearly Netanyahu pushed for war with Iran. It seems unequivocally true that the timing of the war was due to Israel wanting to strike like Marco Rubio said as much but also like Israeli officials did

do a PR campaign in the U.S. to put political pressure on Trump as they did to Obama and other presidents before. I think it's bullshit to say Israel deceived Trump. Trump's a big boy. He can make his own decisions, right? It's also, and then it gets crazy. It's crazy to blame Israel for the Iraq war. That was a Bush-Chainee joint Netanyahu lobbied for it, right? We've all seen the clip of him before U.S. Congress but resolving the U.S. government of agency or blame for Iraq

“is not and no one should believe that. And there's another important biopoint that's worth mentioning.”

So Kent served in the U.S. military. He did 11 combat tours mostly in Iraq. He reportedly also worked as a CIA paramilitary officer and his late wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in January of 2019. He refers to that in the letter by saying he quote, "loss my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel." Now I don't know if he's saying Israel manufactured like the general war on terror or the war in Syria specifically,

either way it is baseless and wrong to blame Israel. On top of that Kent has a bunch of relationships with white nationalist writers and media figures like Nick Fuentes. He's paraded Russian talking points about Ukraine. He defended January 6th. I could go on forever. So long story short, I'm not a fan of this guy but it's hard for me to get past him completely rebuking the idea that Iran posed an imminent threat because all publicly available

information suggests that is the case and this guy at access to the most sensitive intelligence in the entire U.S. government and he believes so too. Yeah, well that part is quite obvious. I mean Iran did not pose an imminent threat. They have not produced any information whatsoever to suggest that they did. And nor can they describe what the imminent threat was. You know Trump said they were going to get a nuclear weapon in two weeks or something

“totally bonkers. I think there are a few pieces of this that you you have to take an isolation”

because like you said Joe Kent is a complicated character. First let's just actually talk for

second about homeland defense and counterintelligence. So the National Counterterrorism Center was created after 9/11 to be the place where you connected the dots. We're all the different intelligence about terrorism came together in one center so you didn't miss plots, right? This was how not a lot can happen as CIA new things and the FBI new things and if anybody put that together we probably would have four of that plot. The reason I say that is because

look, we've read and heard about the chaos at the FBI where you've had a purging of officials including people with counterterrorism experience. Cast Patel is more interested in, you know, shot gunning beers in the locker room at hockey game than protecting America. NCTC now is leaderless. Did you see the photos of Caspatel with the UFC fighters at the training at Quantico? And his tailor made shoes that had the cash slogan with the, you know, dollar sign on it and

he's wearing these yellow shoes that have his personal logo on it like this cash thing. It's the

literally like a teenage boy designed his own shoes on a Nike website and then wore them to be around

the cool fighters. Sorry that's an aside but I could not believe what a fucking loser that guy is. But the reason it's relevant Tommy is that we are poised to be in a period where the homeland threat against United States is going to be incredibly high because Iran may want to carry out attacks on the U.S. homeland. There's probably increased anger at the United States for all manner of things including the wars we've launched in the Middle East and at that time, DHS is leaderless

and has become an immigration deportation machine. The FBI is led by a fucking moron wearing personally branded shoes and NCTC is leaderless. Like that's a huge problem. And so if there's terrorist attacks at home, don't forget that right now, at a period of heightened threat, we have no permanent leader

of DHS and CTC and we've got a clown running the FBI. So that's just dangerous. Then on, on

“Ken's kind of claims, I do think it's important that someone who's spent a lot of time in the”

the MAGA airwaves to just try to understand what's going on there. There is truth and then there's falsehood, right? It is undeniable that BB Netanyahu won the United States to do this. It's absurd to me that this should actually not be controversial. Like BB wanted him to do this, Trump to do this, he won in past Presidents do this. It is also undeniable that APAC has been supportive of whatever BB Netanyahu wanted. Look, Tommy, when we were in the Obama administration, one of

the things you still drive Obama crazy is the APAC people come see him and say that we want to know that you have kishkas, you know, this kind of year to show us. I was thinking about that today. For me, Obama used to be like, "Give the bill in your kishkas." Yeah, but the kishkas they were talking about was to bomb a moron. Like it wasn't subtle, like we don't know that you have it in you to bomb a moron. Like this is, so people do no

“service by pretending like I get and we'll get to the darker places Joe can't go's that are”

deeply antisemitic. But if you tried to pretend, like Israel did had nothing to do with us going to war or that APAC did not support this war. Yeah, you look at it. You are losing credibility to then say that these other things that Joe can said are not true or antisemitic. Like we have to be able to accept two things at once that Israel pushed hard for this, the BB Netanyahu Pashar for this, that I cannot imagine, put this right on me. If BB wasn't pushing for this,

would we have done it? No, we know that because he didn't want us to do it a couple of months ago because we did not have enough posture and like forces in the region to defend it. Yeah, so now to the problematic part, I hate how these magic people act like Trump was who they see as a strong man on everything. On this one where it becomes antisemitic is it's like it's not just a BB pushed for this. It's somehow Trump was like lobotomized and became like a

like a maturing candidate, you know, a robot of these really, no, that's that's where it gets crazy. The idea that they cannot accept that their guy Trump is the one who did this. No one is more responsible for this than Trump, not even Netanyahu because Trump could have said no to Netanyahu. So that's where they lose me where it's like we're going to be intellectually honest up until we have to confront the thing that we're in Comfortworth, which is a Donald Trump did this.

“And then you get to, yes, Joe Kent like takes this to the far extreme. I think that point about”

Syria is that every war that's happened in the Middle East is all part of this is really designed and there's really hand behind every one of these wars, which again, that's where Joe Kent loses his credibility, right? Because there's not an evidentiary basis for that either. We have to be able to kind of find the truth in this kind of cesspool of people that some people who don't acknowledge that BB had aimed at doing this and some people who want to make it about, you know,

world jewelry, you know, there's a truth that is very clear about what happened. Yeah. Now to your point, I do think Maga is about to have a big crack up on this. Yeah, look, I saw some Democrats saying don't share Kent's message. He's the wrong messenger. Don't elevate this guy. I'm like, I just disagree completely. There's no such thing as a right

messenger. This guy will reach people who are part of the Maga base, who will never ever hear,

he will not know that you or I exist and then wouldn't listen to us if they did because of our backgrounds. It can't, it might be, or they've watched nothing, but Fox, where they've been told there was an imminent threat. Exactly. Suddenly, Joe Kent says, and it wasn't. And like I also noticed, you know, Tulsi Gabbard put out a tweet about Kent where she just was like basically said that, you know, Trump is the commander. She's he's responsible for determining what

is and what is not an imminent threat and he acted accordingly, which is neither, it's neither, disagreeing with Kent nor affirming the Iran policy, which just makes me wonder if she's living on borrowed time here. And then again, we just want to get back. We're going to get to this Maga world stuff in a minute, but JD Vance is trying to do this dance where he distances himself

don't think it's working, but I wonder what you think. Ben, so we edited together two of his

answers about Iran recently. One is from Friday of last week, I believe, and then one, I think was from Monday, let's watch. I'm not going to show up here in front of God and everybody else. Tell you exactly what I said in that classified room, partially because I don't want to go to prison

“and partially because I think it's important for the president of the United States to be able to”

talk to his advisors without those advisors running their mouth to the American media. You're trying to drive a wedge between the administration between me and the president. What the president said it consistently, going back to 2015, and I agreed with them, is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. One big difference, Phil, is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we've had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done to do a good job

for the American people to make sure that the mistakes the past are repeated. He's just trying so hard to like signal that he wasn't all in on this war, but also as people have briefed that he told Trump to go big, and he owns everything they're doing. It's not working, buddy. I don't tell you, JD. He's full of shit. That's the main thing you take away from these things.

He's clearly trying to have it both ways. Look, he's never had a problem coming out of meetings

and telling people what his advice was to the president before. It's not like he applies that standard across the board that I don't review my advice to the president. He does constantly. He doesn't want to do it on this one, because either like he went along with the war, or he argued against it, but doesn't have the guts to tell us that. Either one is not very flattering for JD events. And the idea that he thinks he can absolve the consequences of this war by like

winking at MAGA, he's not going to be able to. He owns this, and he's never going to be able to come out and fully, though, to say it was wrong, because he depends on Donald Trump's political survival. So, you're watching JD Vance's diminution as a political figure in real time, because he's identity doesn't work without opposition to forever wars, like it's central to him in a way,

“it's not to a rubio. And so, I think the air of the JD Vance balloon is rapidly running out.”

Yeah, I agree. The air is coming out of JD there a little bit. Okay, so let's talk about the MAGA media while the media generally. So, over on the normal media side, we get FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, threatening networks that cover the war in ways that Trump doesn't like, and, you know, threatened to revoke their licenses. So, that's great. But the really interesting stuff then is happening in the MAGA media world. So, we've talked previously about how some of

the lattice opposition to the world with Iran has come from MAGA media folks. Talk Carlson, Mac and Kelly, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's obviously a Congresswoman, but now is just an outsider doing press. There's also more moderate voices like Joe Rogan, who was spoken out. So, here's a little taste of what they were saying about their opposition to the war, and then we'll come back and talk about what they've been saying since. I think most people,

no matter how they feel about Israel, whether they love it or hate it, or it doesn't matter. It's nothing to do with this specific country. It has to do with any country that might be leading us around, particularly to our destruction, and putting its interest before hours.

“If you want to bet on the future of the Republican Party and keeping people in it,”

you would side with the isolationists, because there's not a person under the age of 40 who's a voting Republican who's in favor of this. Just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars, and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it. Trump has betrayed every last single one of us. Okay,

make no mistake about that. Trump is now an ever-trumper. The very people that we had to fight to get Trump into office, he is now partnered with and insulting us. And he thinks there were two stupid to notice or something. So it's an interesting range of criticism there, right? Like Tucker's talking about Israel, and I can Kelly just making a case for isolationism. You got Rogan being like, no one voted for this, and then Candice Owens is like the Jews and the

Frank is cults are wealthy, American foreign policy. But now is where it gets fun. So the kind of, one of the loudest pro-arand war pro-netnia who voices has been a guy named Mark Levin, he's on Fox News, and Levin has gone super hard at critics of the war, especially Tucker Carlson. He's also going to hard at Megan Kelly for questioning the war. And the fight between these groups finally erupted. So here's Megan Kelly talking about her back and forth with Mark Levin

and Donald Trump weighing in. Let's watch. Since October of this year, he has been coming for me relentlessly. I mean relentlessly. In the most vile and disgusting personal terms possible. Finally, I had enough. And I tweeted at Mark Levin this weekend, something to the fact of,

I'm very sorry about his micro penis, which I really enjoyed. I mean, I thankfully have never

We should be comforting him, because that's got to be really tough. He actually ran to the president of the United States. He ran to Donald Trump and had Trump send out a nice tweet about him last night overnight. And it was a ridiculous tweet for which now the president is getting blowback because he does not have his finger on the pulse of where his party is right now, which is very unusual for Trump. When they go, "LO, we go micro penis."

I mean, Michelle Obama could have known that her line would be invoked like that. So Ben,

I'll be the first to say the Candace Owens is a crazy person in an anti-Semite. But I do think

it's worth reflecting on the fact that the isolationist side is winning in the side criticizing Israel. As winning, there was some pulling out earlier this week that shows US views on Israel have changed dramatically since 2023. That includes a nine-point decrease in the percentage of Republicans who have a favorable view of Israel. A favorable view of Israel are down 21 points with Democrats in 19 points with independence. So like that, I'll just make this kind of battle for the future

of Naga so interesting. And I think as you've said previously on this show, like Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, they're also looking at audience data, like they know what's resonating and getting clicks and getting downloads. And it might be for bad reasons, but like they follow that lead.

“Well, I think that the important point here is that what we're seeing is about the future of”

Maga, not even the president of Maga. Some people pointed to this fact that if you look at the pulling around the Iran war, after the war started, some Republicans and Maga voters kind of came home. Yeah. Yeah, that's not surprising. No, most people like Donald Trump. That's probably about stuff. Yeah, whatever. They like Trump. So I'll go along with Trump where they watch Fox. These people, Tucker in particular, are kind of at the Vanguard to use a term

of where Maga is going. It doesn't matter if it's only a smaller percentage. It's where the energy is flowing. It's certainly where the younger people are going. If you look at the numbers on support for Israel, the only demographic that is staying firm in support for Israel are Republicans over the age of 50. The younger people get in Maga, the more they don't like the war, and the more they want to rethink the relationship to Israel. Tucker gets that,

Megan Kelly is following Tucker's lead on that. Candace Owens has built a huge audience on a bunch of things including this, but also on just conspiracy theory. And I do think that there's a sense that this is a betrayal of something fundamental to Maga. This immigration, no forever wars, and kind of upending the elites. That was the core Maga project. And so he's

betrayed a core promise. And Candace said that never Trump thing, that Trump's become never

Trump or as much as Candace as a lunatic, the point there that's interesting to me is that this is not a case where some other people in Maga got Trump to do something that another faction of Maga did want to do. The people that wanted Trump to do this were not Maga. And so

“if you take Lindsey Graham, I think that for a long time, Maga kind of was entertained by”

the Lindsey Graham Trump friendship in part because they hated Lindsey Graham. And it was kind of funny to them that Trump seemed to carry Lindsey Graham's balls around in his pocket. And Lindsey Graham just kisses ass. Sorry for that imagery. But now the appearances at Lindsey Graham just got Donald Trump to do something and brag about it. And the logic is about it. Yeah. So I think this is a big problem. And I would not, if I were Donald Trump, take comfort in the polling that shows

a lot of Maga people prove this. Because I think Tucker is looking past Trump who's going to take the mantle. And you don't see anybody, whether it's JD Vance, Steven and Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson, the people that are thinking about how do I have the audience after Trump? None of them are betting that Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham are where that's going to go. No, the Mark Levin is not the future. It's a Candace Owens doing a 12 part series that's Sarah Netanyahu was born to do or something

like that. That's where we all have to look forward to. Ben, last thing on this, the the dumbest Nealcons, I've noticed have been coming out of the woodwork to support the war. Bush propagandist

turned Saudi employee Ari Flasher. Oh, this is amazing. So he complained that quote today's

media cheer against the U.S. overstate enemy abilities under state hours and paint a picture that the U.S. is losing while we are winning. And then he posted an article from 2001 from the

“New York Times where I think that was RW Apple, the author talked about concern that Afghanistan”

could turn into a quagmire like Vietnam. Then what happened in Afghanistan after that? It turned into a quagmire. There was longer. Much longer. Right. We were there for 20 years. It's an amazing window into the kind of paranoid mindset of these guys that because if you

it happened because people in the media said it would happen that everything would have been fine

Afghanistan. If RW Apple didn't write that there would be a quagmire that that's somehow created the quagmire. And this is kind of a weird part of the kind of right-wing authoritarian mindset, which is that if bad things happen because of what we do, it's not our fault. It's because

“of the media like writing about the bad things that happened. That's what scary about it to me.”

It was crazy. He'd be like three points another than made sense. He was like, and then after this article was written, Kabul fell. It's like, hey buddy, again, fast forward to Kabul falling again to the Taliban. The other one I just want to quickly flag then was a post from New Gingrich, Mr. Gingrich tweeted an article that said, instead of fighting over the straight-of-home moves, we should cut a new channel to the Persian Gulf. I think kind of threw

Oman. Here's how he described it. This is from New Gingrich. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you've got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal deeper than the Suez and safe from Iranian attacks. There was a community note on his tweet that said, this proposal originates from a satirical article published the same day presented as a humorous open letter with a disclaimer that its views "do not necessarily represent those of anyone with brain cells." So that was a speaker

of the house for a while. Well, not only that, this was a man who was held up as kind of the intellectual. I mean, seriously, like if you know, those of you not all not remember these days, he was this professor and he was this intellect and we were supposed to take him seriously. We are like, I've learned that these are the dumbest fucking people imaginable that it had been like driving this country to the far right. I mean, I didn't need to get into why

nuclear explosions are not the answer to the street of our moves, but

“the new doesn't seem to get that. Yeah, I think the Amani's might not appreciate the”

question of nuclear detonations. So a couple more things on Iran. So there's this op-ed and Al-Jazeera of all places that has been making the rounds in DC. I got it sent to me a bunch of times. I don't know if you did too then. And it did too. It makes the case that the war in Iran is going really well. And I thought it would be worth trying to like steal man the argument and like take it on seriously. It's by guy name Muhammadad Salum. I think he

seems to have worked in like the intel world now as a professor. It's a long piece, so I can't do it all, but I'm sure to summarize it in like a good faith way and get your reaction. So he argues the following. Like when you look at Iran's ballistic missiles, they're nuclear infrastructure in their military. It is being systematically degraded and destroyed after decades of the US allowing it to build up. So that's an important correction in his view. He says that phase two of

the world be taken out Iran's industrial base, so the missile production facilities, the nuclear

facilities and basically set them back to square one. He argues that the pre-bombing status quo

for Iran's nuclear program was unsustainable and that Iran was basically just being allowed to like constantly inch towards getting a nuclear weapon and that weakness is what led to this moment where we had to deal with it militarily. He conceits that the argument for a nuclear deterrent will be strengthened not weakened by the military conflict. Like if you're Iran, Iran will probably want to get a bomb, but says that's an argument for a quote, a comprehensive post-conflict diplomatic

architecture, not arguments against the military campaign itself. He argues that closing the straight-of-war moves hurts Iran the most financially and also hurts their relationship with China while its capacity to close the straight is also being steadily degraded and he says that this war is going to kill off Iran's ability to have a proxy network and quote, "What the critics describe as an expanding regional war is better understood as the death spasm of a proxy architecture

whose authorizing center has been shattered." He says the disarmament Iran is like the happening now is similar to what allies did to Germany in 1944 and '45, which is a prelude to a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in public, a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement,

or a sustained enforcement posture, basically saying like look, there's no diplomatic framework

to end the war that is public yet, but that doesn't mean the military campaign is failing. I'll stop there. What do you make of that claim? And why do you think this is getting gaining so much currency in DC? First of all, it's funny that the very people sharing this are often people who say don't listen to Al Jazeera. Yeah, I know that so.

“I think the fundamental flaw with this is that he is kind of accepting the premise that”

you can measure a war based on the amount of things that you're destroying. And so to me, there are two questions related to that. Let's take him at his word that Iran's ballistic missiles will be significantly setback, their ability to manufacture ballistic missiles will be setback, their nuclear program will be setback significantly. We'll see if there's a ground operation to get nuclear fuel a lot of Iran. There are two questions though. One, was it worth all this?

So before even what happens after the war was just setting back their ballistic missile program, nuclear program worth all this death, all this violence, all this global economic disruption,

But second, even more importantly, time doesn't stop. Iran will rebuild its ballistic missile capabilities. Iran will want a nuclear weapon, and it might take a little longer, but if this regime survives,

“you have to think that they're going to be more hellbent on some kind of deterrent.”

And he kind of gives away the game with the Germany reference. We occupy Germany fully and carved it into four zones and ran the place. Like if we're not, you cannot do that from the air. You cannot engineer a political transition from the air. And so if you get a regime implosion, I actually think that's worse. For the Iranian people in the region, because you could get a civil war that draws in neighbors, you could get refugee flows, you could have tens of thousands of

people die. So the problem with it is the article only makes sense if you look at Iran as like a spreadsheet of ballistic missiles, ballistic missile launchers, nuclear fuel, and ignore the entire

political dynamic around it on the back end of the war. Never mind the cost of doing all this and

is whether it's just how we want to spend tens of billions of dollars in all this time. So it's a good steel man for what's working, but all that's working is destruction. There's no political strategy, there's no geopolitical strategy, and even in the peace, the only naughty can make us to some secret plan that is akin to post-war Germany, which again was a much different scenario. Yeah, he keeps sort of like Yadayada adding this diplomatic framework that would be needed.

But again, like how are you going to get them to agree to that, or are you going to do a

“ground invasion, or are you going to fully occupy them? Yeah, how are you seeing an agree to that?”

Also, I think it kind of ignores the impact now. Like the biggest winner of this war is Russia. Yeah. The price of oil is way up. Russia's making more money. The financial times as they're

making another $150 million per day, because prices are up. Trump has temporarily lifted sanctions

on Russian oil, ostensibly to lower prices, but that hasn't even worked. The U.S. and Israel are blowing up so many missile defense interceptor missiles that there's no chance we'll give you crane anymore. And any hope for these peace talks that you might have, look, I think Whitkoff and Jared Kushner are hapless idiots, and they're not going to, you know, get a peace deal. But Putin is completely pulled out of any talks now. Like there's no chance of anything

happening on the diplomatic front. The other place that's benefiting enormously is North Korea, so that the U.S. is pulling missile defense systems at a South Korea. We're putting them in the Middle East and then North Korea over the weekend tested rocket launchers that can fire tactical nuclear weapons. So that doesn't feel good for us. And also the Chinese are watching us pull, you know, missile defense assets out of South Korea. By the way, when we put them in South

Korea, the Chinese flip their shit. And they imposed all these economic consequences on the South Koreans, and now we're just rat-fucking South Koreans by pulling these things out again. And they too are watching the U.S. burn through its stockpile of interceptor missiles and T-lams and things we do use any conflict with China. And also, eviscerate any moral authority that the U.S. might have had to rally the world around stopping an indation of Taiwan. So like, there's a lot of unintended

consequences here. Well, this is the thing. And U.S. wise is getting currency in D.C. It's because people in D.C. love the fallacy that the United States controls events in the world and that we alone are the actor. And so they love the narrative that no, no, look, our military is capable of destroying their ballistic missile launchers and their drone capabilities and assassining their leaders and setting back the nuclear program. And they're looking in a narrow tunnel at these

kind of outputs and Iran as proof that the United States is controlling events in the world because we're destroying all these things inside of Iran. If you step back and you say, well, yes, but wait

“a second, what if Russia is getting enormous benefits from this war economic and geopolitical?”

What if the Gulf States are going to turn away from the United States towards China and Russia for their security potentially in the future? What if North Korea acts on South Korea or China acts on a Taiwan? What about the American people losing even more confidence in their government? What about the tens of billions of dollars that we had to spend on a war that didn't need to be fought? DC doesn't like to look at all of that. The blob doesn't like to look at all that. They

love to show up and brag about how any fucking ballistic missiles they destroyed in Iran never

mind that they made everything else in the world worse. And by the way, if you look at polling and you want to look at arguments against the war, the shithead polls through the roof is the argument that we should not be spending billions of dollars on weapons or sending like a billion of days looking like that. We should be spending on literally anything else, education, jobs, like whatever it is. Photers fucking hate it, but you're right, the DC blob views it very differently.

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left out loud when he was briefed. There's a senior official quoted who said he has not stopped laughing about it for days. The claim is that Hamine has been in a long-term sexual relationship with either his childhood tutor or someone that worked for the family. The least believable part of this article is that Hamine made sexual overtures to people caring for him after he was hurt in an air strike. He was drugged up or something. It just doesn't really track to me that you could have

like your foot blown off in an air strike. He's incapacitated but he's hitting on his nurse. I'm not sure that works. The story describes Hamine as the power behind the robes, hopefully more

powerful than Mark 11, and claims the intel was derived from one of the most protected sources

that the government has. There's also been some traffic in WikiLeaks from 2008 about Hamine may be getting treatment for impotence in the UK. This broader belief that he was not the one he was not the father. Hamine's father did not want him to take over for him but that for whatever reasons. So Ben, who knows if this is remotely true? I was reminded last night when I was researching all of this that the CIA constantly floats theories like this that autocrats that U.S. wants

to topple or like that guys we don't like are gay. The Washington Post back in the day reported that the CIA considered releasing a fake video that was supposed to be of Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy that was faith out that would work somehow. They apparently did film a fake video of a fake Osama then Laden, bragging about gay conquest and they thought about leaking that one. There was something you know in the advocate about gay porn at Gaddafi's house at one point like

none of this is very subtle. I doubt it's particularly effective either but I'm sure you know the Trub White House is quite satisfied with you. So they're they're Steven Chung their press guy like giddly retweeting it. Yeah but it's if you wanted to have like an information operation which again I don't think we should in this space I don't know why denigrating people on their sexuality is a space that United States should be in but you would do it subtly like it would be appear in

some regional publication like going to the New York Post. So freaking transparent I mean you might as well put it in like the free beacon or something. I mean the idea that the New York Post

“is at the vanguard of coverage of the intelligence community and has gotten this secret you know”

through its sources. No like they were someone called and was like hey we got a fun one for you want to write this and we told Trump and he laughed. So it it was kind of fits with the kind of war

this is not going to have an impact inside of Iran. It just feels like it's a charm in the

water for for them to be entertained which is kind of part of what's so chilling about this.

“And I don't know what the harmonies sexuality is. I will say this though again I believe that”

actually he wouldn't have been chosen and that shows the failure of the policy because he is a tool of the IRGC. That's all he is right now. Like he's the Supreme Leader name doesn't matter how injury he is. The IRGC is running the show down there. Do you think any of the lips were reading this and they're like more LGBT Theo crats. Remember the famous team of criticism guys. That's the thing they see their culture wars is global. Like I don't really care to make our

culture wars. Yeah no. Also Ben I do want you to know that there was a draft intro to this

section written by someone on our team who wanted me to read the following. Well Ben as you're so fond of saying Trump 2.0 has been an absolute banner era for the sinister homosexuals of the world. You want to meet up with that quote in your mouth and I didn't know. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. This is a segment of mine multiple minefields. We are racing the pride flag here. Crooked HQ for Michelle. Okay. Let's turn a Cuba when you'll do one fun thing that we're out

and we get the Ben's interview. So Cuba remains in crisis. There was the total black out across the island on Monday. The Cuban electrical grid has been shaky in subject to blackouts or brownouts for a while. But the full blackout comes to the U.S. has been enforcing an energy embargo on the island since January that includes cutting off all oil from Ben as well and shipments from Mexico.

“So it's a very dire life is intolerable for the average person. No refrigeration. There's no”

trash collection in all the streets because the garbage trucks don't have gas. There are thousands of surgical procedures have been postponed and they are growing protest movements. The Trump administration meanwhile has been in talks with the Cubans. It's Marco Rubio talking to Raul Castro's grandson who was also named Raul and apparently nicknamed the Crab or Raulito. So the New York Times said that the U.S. wants President Diaz Canal to be ousted as a precondition for resetting relations

with the U.S. Trump was asked about all things Cuba Monday. Here's his incredibly weird ominous reply. Let's watch. When you say Cuba is next, Cuba is Cuba, whatever you do with the military there seems like something. Well that will work more like a ran or that is where it will. I can tell you that they're talking to us. It's a failed nation. They have no money. They have no oil.

“They have nothing. They have nice land. They have nice landscape. But I think you've been seeing”

the, you know, all my life I've been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it? I do believe I'll be the owner of having the honor of taking Cuba. I think that that's a big honor. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. It's like he sounds like like a comic book villain like it's I mean do you think that rhetoric will make it even harder to get a deal done or is Cuba just so like decimated that they're just going to be forced to gun point

to do something? I mean first on his rhetoric, it's outrageous and we should not be decentralized to the fact that this he's talking about pure colonization. Like I'm going to take Cuba. Like this is imperial shit, right? It's great land. And this is the third country this calendar year. Tommy, it is March 17th and he's talking about the third government he's going to house. Like I don't know like who needs to wake up to the fact that an authoritarian leader launching

war after war and replacing government after government has historical echoes. They're not good

echoes because they continue and never mind that it's just wrong. We don't colonize countries. We

shouldn't, I guess we do now, but we shouldn't. That's no way to kind of enter into a negotiation. Now on the negotiation itself part of what is so interesting to me about this is that Dia's canal is not a very important figure Cuba. I know it says ridiculous. He's a president of the country, but nobody's ever seen him as the actual leader of the country. Right? When I negotiated Raul Castro was transitioned to Dia's canal and I met Raul Castro, I met his son,

I met the far minister, I met lots of people. I never met Dia's canal. He was often described by Cuba and Nelson some Cubans as kind of a front man, an aparachic, right? The guy who got the job because he was not going to challenge anybody else's power. Raul Castro still has some power even those in his 90s. The military has a lot of power. So I don't know, this isn't even like negotiating getting rid of Maduro and replacing him with Delsea Rodriguez. Maduro was actually the leader of

that regime. So I guess the Cubans might, I can see why some of the Cubans might be like,

If Trump wants to take Cuba like he'll need more, I've seen thus far the Cubans release some political prisoners. They maybe they put Dia's canal in the table on some fashion. But what they're trying to negotiate is we stay in power and nothing really changes, but we give you some symbolic win and maybe we let you develop some real estate down here. That's probably what the Cubans are

“aiming for. Trump seems aiming for something more. And I think he needs more pushback. He needs”

to feel more pushback. It's not okay that we're starving in Ireland. People are dying because of American sanctions. People are dying because if you have blackouts like this and people can't get food and people can't get medical care because the power shut off. Like that's the scale of what is happening in Cuba right now. It is tantamount to an active war to kind of completely block aid a place to the point that the power grid goes down. Yeah, they're trying to turn it to Haiti.

It is unconscionable and it just seems to be, I mean, people are so distracted by what's happening

in Ireland and everywhere, so it's just sort of happening. Finally Ben, it's a bit of a sweet

day here at Potentea the World because we are bidding goodbye. At least for now to a show favorite, listeners that probably heard us talk about Rick Grinnell, a living, breathing, Twitter troll turned diplomat. Rick was kind of a reject toy in the Bush administration than he found

“favor with Trump. He was US ambassador to Germany, we managed to make basically every German political”

party hate him. He served in some weird special envoy role to Serbia and Kosovo for a minute. He was director of national intelligence at the end of the first Trump term, which is terrifying. And then for Trump 2.0, Grinnell made a very hard play to become Secretary of State and it did not end well. Apparently Susie Wiles Trump's Chief of Staff cannot stand Rick Grinnell because he's a dickhead and he screamed at her. So Trump made him like a special envoy to Venezuela,

but he got crosswise on policy with Rubio and ultimately fucked that job up so badly that we toppled and invaded the government of Venezuela. That's probably more, you know, correlation and causation, but, you know, roll with me here. And then Trump installed him his head of the Kennedy Center for Grinnell apparently fucked that up, too, because the place is now close for two years. No one would play there and Grinnell just got pushed out of that job, too.

So, um, we hope this is not goodbye, it's more of a seawater, but any final thoughts on his tenure.

I just always knew of his longstanding and deep passion for the arts, Tommy.

And, and so to see him lose this premier platform to advance his interest in, you know, opera and the performance arts in this country is just heartbreaking. I will say that the series lesson to take away is whenever the sun looked this happens reminded that no matter how far you wedge your head up Trump's ass, like the bus is going to roll over you at some point. I hope that's lesson that people take from this because this guy was out there doing stop the steel press conferences

with Rudy Giuliani in the final dead enders after January 6. He was down there kissing the ring of Marlago. He was trolling every Trump adversary. He was trying to do crop business deals with Jared Kushner and Serbia. That deal fell apart, by the way. So, poor enough for that. Were they willing to do it in a apology for the NATO mission? Which is, inlessly funny. And now we can kind of go back to being a lonely Twitter troll. So, good luck. Back to who he

really is, maybe. Back to, yeah. Yeah, I was rereading some of the stories about Grinnell. I didn't I'd forgotten that he floated himself as vice president. Yes, he did. There was one of the art

little too close to the sudden dead wreck a little bit. Yeah, it's amazing when someone is just

such an asshole that Trump, like, talks about it very publicly. He's like, I got a lot of,

“a little rough wreck, a little rough. There's this, one of the stories, I think it was the times”

linked to an Instagram post of these absolutely insane vicious over the top emails. He sent to a like finger style guitar player who was scheduled to play at the Kennedy Center who asked some basic questions. Just like this guy was untill he asked everybody. Yeah. And it's terrible person. It just did not work. But we wish in the best of luck, maybe you can come on the show here in LA. Oh, it'll be back like arguing with you on Twitter. Yeah, he'll be he'll be back on,

online. Okay, we're going to take a break. But when we come back, you're in here Ben's conversation with Kim Gadas about the massive war and displacement happening in Lebanon. So stick around for that. Potev girl is brought to you by Hayah. There's something that might keep you up at night as a parent. Our kids are the first generation growing up on ultra-processed foods in the long-term effects. We are only beginning to understand them. That's exactly why Hayah exists to give parents a real

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That is a human life and it is all happening right now. Do you worry about your own safety being involved in all this? Yes, but it doesn't really feel like there's another option, you know. And of course they use a 5-year-old child as bait and of course they're doing all these horrible bad things because they don't know what they're doing. They've been told that they're going to

“get rid of the worst of the worst than they have absolute immunity and they've been told that”

nothing they do will they ever be held accountable for. On my show runaway country we go where the headlines hit home from communities under threat to the people fighting to be heard. New episodes of runaway country drop every Thursday, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Okay we're very pleased to welcome back to Potset the World Kim Gatos who is an analyst author and

longtime journalist based in Beirut. She's spent more than two decades covering the Middle East. She is now a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a contributing editor for the Financial Times and the author of Black Wave which we definitely recommend to people. Kim, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Pat. So I understand that you recently left Beirut and you know there's a lot to get into in terms of the dynamics inside of Lebanon but

just to begin with what was it like you know recently when you were there and how do you describe kind of what Sun Folded it in the last several days. So I do want to clarify that I left

because this is a pre-planned trip and I'm always very careful to emphasize that because friends

in Lebanon or acquaintances or people who follow my work worry a lot if they see me leaving the country. So I want to emphasize that it's a pre-planned trip because I have to go teach at university in the United States and I had to make a detour through Europe to pick up my visa because the US embassy in Beirut closed already at the end of February. And so we've been living with the tension of the military buildup and I was fairly convinced that there would be a war

that the negotiations would not go anywhere. For Lebanon there is a real sense of trauma being revived of layers of PTSD of exhaustion because when the last time you and I spoke was just before the last war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel in 2024 that was a devastating conflict coming a year after a year of war in Gaza after the massacre of October 7th and Lebanon has just been

recovered from the financial crisis of 2019-2020. We now have almost a million refugees displaced

“internally that's a fourth or a fifth of the country's population and this puts a huge tall on resources”

on families, on the government, on NGOs that really cannot cope with this renewed conflict. I also want to just point out one more thing Ben, is that since the ceasefire in November 2024 up until the conflict resumed, Israel continued to strike Lebanon regularly. There were over 2,000 strikes

on Lebanon during that time which don't make headlines and Hezbollah never responded. And so there

is real anger in Lebanon today because as soon as Ali Khemeni was killed, Hezbollah most likely in coordination with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched missiles at Israel to avenge the death of Khemeni. So you have the opponents of Hezbollah who are angry because they say you know what do we have to do with this? Why did you drag us into this war? And even amongst the supporter of Hezbollah, there are people who say you let 2,000 attacks by Israel go by and you never

decided to retaliate for that. But for the leader of Iran, you retaliate and you drag us into a war

“when we've very had time to recover from the last one. Yeah and I think for people who don't”

follow this is closely right, this was the separate ceasefire reached with Hezbollah and Lebanon in 2024 which has been violated. I want to get into what Hezbollah and Israel are doing but just before that, I do want to ask you just one more question about the people of Lebanon, new reference

that almost a million people have been displaced. There are evacuation orders for a huge part of

southern Lebanon from Israel, parts of southern Beirut. Where are these people going to go? Is it my question? It's not like Lebanon's already a small country, it's already had to absorb refugees from Syria over the years and other places, it's not like their other countries next door

“where are these million people going? So they're going to other areas of Beirut and of Lebanon,”

into the Shuf, into the Bekha Valley, into the north. The Lebanese government has opened hundreds of refugee centers and public schools which brings up another problem, you know,

kids can't go to public schools, private schools are open but as far as I understand public schools

have not been able to reopen. A lot of people are staying with relatives, with friends, with acquaintances, you know, people in Lebanon continue to be incredibly generous, opening their doors, and villages. Those who kind of forwarded have rented houses and other parts of Lebanon have gone into hotels or unfortunately are sleeping on the street in the rain. It is pouring with rain in Lebanon. This is bringing up, you know, a lot of tension, also social

tension, you know, amidst all this intense, you know, Lebanon is a pressure cooker. So there are, you know, inevitably, you know, local fights erupting. There is some anger in some parts of Lebanon towards those in the milieu of of Hasbalah who may have become refugees and in some places they're not wanted because the responses you brought this onto yourself and and on to us. There are also unfortunately security concerns because amongst the refugees there are members of Hasbalah and

of the IRGC and we have seen a few instances of targeted Israeli strikes in civilian areas well outside of the southern suburbs or areas where Hasbalah is is dominant and where it was very clearly targeting IRGC members for example in a hotel in on the seaside Corniche of Beirut. They had taken a hotel room and they were, they were struck there. So this is a lot for a small country to manage. In terms of your assessment of what Israel is trying to accomplish, you know, from

the Israeli side it's what you hear is that they're trying to kind of destroy Hisbalah once and for all, they're issuing kind of these ultimatums to the Lebanese government to kind of break from

think that what Israel wants is actually to kind of permanently occupy and perhaps inevitably annex

“southern Lebanon and that you even have some Israeli politicians, none of us so in any of the people”

further to the right saying that. I mean, you can't know for sure which it is but how do you assess the kind of spectrum of what the objectives may be for Israel between wanting to degrade Hisbalah to potentially wanting to hold territory. It could be all of this then at this point and I just want to rewind a little bit into history and say that Israel has tried this before, pushing out the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon in 1982 with an invasion that went all the way up

to Beirut with Israel, as Minister of Defense, you know, this is going to change the region,

this is going to help us get rid of the PLO once and for all, this is going to bring Syria down

on its knees and push Lebanon to sign a peace agreement with Israel. The PLO did leave and the Palestinian guerrillas did get on a boat but instead we got Hasbalah and it went downhill from there and it was, you know, when America became a target of bombing attacks in the Middle East with the Marine barracks bombing of course in 1983 and the U.S. embassy bombing. Right now I feel like we're just having a replay of this and Israel has abandoned any pretence of trying for diplomacy or for

deterrence and it's just going for what they call mowing the grass and they keep doing this again and again and they may have, you know, tactical military victories but they're not translating any of it over the last two years into diplomatic successes and real diplomatic engagement that can make this long lasting. What are they trying to do in Lebanon today? Mowing the grass again, degrading Hasbalah as much as possible even though, you know, they said that by the end of 2024 they had degraded Hasbalah

down to, you know, at least 70, you know, up to 70% and Israel accuses the Lebanese government of not having done enough in the year of the ceasefire to make sure that Hasbalah is fully degraded and disarmed but of course there are concerns in Lebanon that taking on Hasbalah sending the Lebanese army to forcefully disarm Hasbalah could lead to a civil war. So Israel's argument as well,

“you know, the Lebanese government failed to do its job, we're going to do it. I think they also”

want to take parts of South Lebanon maybe five, ten kilometers into the territory. Establish a buffer zone, you know, hello history we've been there before with a buffer zone from 1982 to 2000 which, you know, did not protect northern Israel. I don't know if they want to go further into Lebanon further than they had before but what I think and again, you know, who really knows but from watching some of the military moves and from looking at the map and looking at what they've

done already on the Syrian side, outside of the Golan, they've expanded the buffer zone, they've taken Mount Hermann and then from there they can connect to the Bekha Valley and then take the rest of, you know, that border area along the border with Israel up until the Mediterranean sea. So you have a neat sort of buffer zone that then connects with the West Bank. So I think that's

“that's what I think they're trying to do. It's important to point out that the Lebanese government”

has offered to sit down for direct negotiations with Israel which is something that's going a

little bit unnoticed but is really a historic first. It is breaking a big taboo. I'm not saying

that negotiations with Israel necessarily lead to positive developments but it is definitely worth noticing that the Lebanese government has offered these negotiations and has come out very forcefully to say that Hasbala's military and security actions are outside of the law and that is a very big step for Lebanon. Well yeah I'm going to get to that but one more question about Israel which is there's this question of whether there'll be a large scale ground invasion and perhaps

to occupy that buffer zone however large it ends up being. Is there a sense of inevitability around it is really ground invasion in Lebanon and are some of these government diplomatic overtures meant to kind of force stall that kind of ground invasion and de-escalate before it gets to that. Part of it is certainly trying to force stall that ground invasion but Israel has made very clear that it will not stop whatever its military plans are for the negotiations they

will negotiate they want the Lebanese to negotiate under fire. I'm not sure you know where where

so they don't need to occupy it they just need to monitor it you know with drones with towers with I don't

know walls but the idea that I've heard also that you know maybe settlers will move in there

“I don't think so I think it is the geography of Lebanon does not allow for Israeli settlers to move”

into this buffer zone inside Lebanon and be safe from you know what will be for sure renewed activity to try to then liberate southern Lebanon so I suspect it will be a empty an uninhabited demonethorized zone and that will then be part of the negotiation as well if they happen with this with the Lebanese government. Yeah so ground invasion is more about on our taking out his

blood infrastructure and clearing out an area and then clearing out a large enough area that you

from Israel's perspective you guarantee there are no incursions by Hasbalah into Israel and that you push back as much as possible from into Lebanon and and Denai Hasbalah close range attacks against

“Israel but you know some of these missiles have much longer ranges anyway. The idea is probably also”

to sort of break up the popular base that Hasbalah uses or relies on for its support. If you splinter the Shi'a community where Hasbalah still finds support if you push them out of the southern suburbs of Beirut and they're scattered around the country because they're not allowed to go home because Israel is continuing to strike their areas then potentially Israel is also thinking about making it harder for Hasbalah to operate and most certainly it is trying to provoke tensions

within Lebanon but we have been through a civil war before including one which including including an episode which came after Israel did after Lebanon and Israel did sign a security agreement

“in 1983 and the uprising against it was very violent and it was led by at the time Syria's”

Hafizal Assad the president the sort of nascent Hasbalah and various other factions and the army split into two and the Lebanese president was the former army chief is really trying to prevent that. Well yeah I wanted to ask about this internal dynamics so you mentioned that it seemed like his book came into this war after Alec Hamanai was killed kind of firing rockets into Israel as part of the Iranian bombardment. You then had a situation where the Lebanese Prime Minister

did speak out against Hasbalah you know but the question is where does this go from there and and what is your sense of if you have Israel trying to kind of manufacture politics and Lebanon with force you know kind of compelling the government to fully diminish Hasbalah's political actor disarm them but at the same time you have a shea population that's being fractured do you have people that are upset that Israel's bombarding the country how does Lebanese politics

hold up under this what is a potential plan for Lebanese political leaders but had a manage being cop between his book and Israel. The very difficult very difficult I haven't seen many creative ideas right now on the table other than offering to negotiate the other approach by the Lebanese government is to try to in a way do what they didn't really do properly over the last year was to which is to make sure that Hasbalah can no longer launch rockets but nobody really wants to see

the Lebanese army intervene in between Hasbalah and and Israel that is not Lebanon's that is not the Lebanese army's role either and already we're hearing from members of Hasbalah it's you know officials who are still alive calling for an uprising against the Lebanese government describing the Lebanese government as a co-beliterant with with Israel which really you know stirs the pot in terms of sectarian tensions and political tensions and I know that this all sounds sort of quite

local and specific to Lebanon but it is really part of the bigger war that we're witnessing

unfold in the region because it's very clear that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are operating in Lebanon

other countries yet again fighting their wars on our territory and using Lebanese territory you know

as as they please but second it also means that these two fronts Lebanon and the war against Iran

are happening in tandem and I don't think anybody knows yet how either one really ends other than my prediction that there will be a you know a demilitarized uninhabited zone along the border between Lebanon and and Israel you know this war you know started without international support without UN resolution without congressional approval and there may be a lot of tactical successes, military successes but it's also become much bigger than anyone anticipated in the Trump administration

and as my good friend and analyst Karim Sajad Por said it went from being a war of choice to

war of necessity to open the straight of Hormuz and as well as watching very carefully how this

works out because it is also for their own political survival in Lebanon as a political entity and as a militant entity that they're fighting this war how it ends will determine both in Iran and in Lebanon what the future of Lebanon and the region will look like well yeah I wanted one thing you've written about the Gulf States too you've written a book about Saudi Arabia and Iran one of the things I'm struck by is just how weak you know and compromise the Gulf States position

feels right now in the sense that you know Israel is a hegemon and a region you know it's whatever you

think of it's actions it has freedom of action the United States is still a hegemon in terms of

its ability to project power the Iranians have a lot of power they they've been able to you know shut down the economies of parts of the Gulf States the straight of Hormuz and that you have these

“big rich Arab countries that just seem caught in the crossfire I know geopolitically I think”

I know what that means which is they're going to have to find hedges against United States they may feel like they need to align more to check Israeli power but just in terms of public opinion in a place like Lebanon what is the perception of the lack of capacity for the Gulf States the Gulf cooperation council the GCC the Arab League like the the idea that there's no capacity for any kind of Arab support for Lebanon in this moment when they're kind of being

caught in the crossfire of this region of war actually I think there has been support for for Lebanon and I think that you know the Saudis but also the Turks and the Egyptians have been quite involved to make sure that they tamp down whatever Israel is trying to to do we also had

“French involvement I believe to try to reduce the intensity of what Israel was trying to achieve”

in the southern suburbs a couple of weeks ago when they put out a an evacuation notice for the whole area which had not happened before a little bit like they used to do in Gaza in Lebanon so far it is quite targeted it used to be building by building move out of this building move out of that building and crazily enough then people listen to or or read these tweets by the Israeli army a spokespeople who say you know this building is going to be targeted move 500 meters back

and they actually do and they film and it's it's crazy that people trust the Israeli sort of warnings that you know 500 meters away and you'll be fine but suddenly there was a whole area wide evacuation and I think the French intervene to say if you know if you're planning to carpet bomb this area we strongly you know recommend that you don't and indeed it wasn't as bad as people thought even I left my apartment because I live very close I live you know not even half a mile away

from the southern suburbs so it gets quite loud and even I left because we weren't sure anymore

“what to what to expect so we can be very critical of of Arab countries for for many reasons but I think”

that they are trying to help us much as I think it's having I think it is having a bit of an impact yes I think we could be if if possible even in a worse position there was this crazy idea apparently from the Trump administration to call on Ahma de Shara in Syria to get involved in Lebanon to disarhe as Bala which is really again a repeat of all the you know bad stuff that happened in in the late 70s and 80s in Lebanon and the Saudis and the Turks intervened quite strongly and advised

I think they're doing as decent a job as possible in intercepting these drones and missiles that

Iran is launching I think they're angry at everyone at the moment but they're mostly worried at this point they they may not have wanted this war and I strongly believe they did not despite some reporting that that you know suggested that the that the Saudis wanted this I don't think they wanted it they want to build they want to have economic prosperity they have grand plans and ambitions etc but now that this war has started and that Iran has clearly as

expected not capitulated they really don't want to be left with a wounded Iranian regime

that is just going to come back and and hit them again in six months or or year so right now I think

probably in you know the back channels is the advice to the Trump administration you know

“try to finish this job we're not quite sure what this means but you need to degrade”

Iran's capacities enough that we don't feel we have this this threat hanging over us for the next you know for a repeat of this I still don't discount the possibility that the regime does somehow collapse in Iran which could go in two ways chaos in civil war or somehow an internal opposition that organizes and maybe even Palavi Resapalavi despite all his

shortcomings somehow coalesce to to make something of of the day after I think we're looking at

another month of war at least Ben well the last question when I said about Lebanon which is it you know we've lived through this kind of quote unquote mowing the grass I bombing Lebanon periodically and now it's reached another level that feels like akin to the early 80s and and like you said the the PLO become you know leaves but then Hezbollah comes in I mean it does strike me that the absence of political objectives in this war

for all these military tactical objectives um one of the the problems with that is the other thing that's not being considered is the amount of resentment that is being generated by this constant military action I mean what what do you see as the recipe for peace in a situation where you know it's asking a lot of people to just absorb being bombed this regularly without it doesn't need to be peace it can be you know uh uh armistice let's just agree not to fight anymore and you stay there

“and I stay here and let's not talk but let's not fight. I think people in Lebanon specifically”

I cannot speak for the wider region I have some sense of how people feel which is most likely angry at Iran and pissed off at Israel they're worried about replacing you know one actor that brings chaos Iran with another actor that brings chaos that has a military superiority which allows it to live somewhat safely within its own borders whereas you know Iran shares borders with so many countries including um Saudi Arabia and you know the proximity is is is is making a difference in

the sense that more missiles and drones are now landing on Arab countries than on Israel so this is the sense in the Arab world and in the Gulf countries that they don't want to be left with this problem because Israel has more capacity to defend itself and America is far away but no one is getting closer to Iran right they're trying to talk to Iran but nobody's thinking you know what now is the time to try to find another site deal with with Iran or a detente with Iran even though

the detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran served Saudi Arabia quite well over the last few

“years since they had it signed in Beijing in March 2023 when it comes to Lebanon I think the”

overwhelming sentiment Ben is we are fed up of being the battleground for everybody else's wars we are fed up Iran Israel Syria everybody fights their battles on our ground are the Lebanese guilty of allowing that to happen as well to some extent yes but we're a small country and some of it is beyond our capacity I'm I'm very curious to see how the Lebanese government and the president are going to manage this period and whether they can somehow get Lebanon to the other site

of this war mostly intact and then somehow negotiate the return of people to southern Lebanon it's a

pushing and be proactive you know the Lebanese government needs to be proactive in this yeah well

“it's a lot to it's a lot to to take on I mean with everything in Iran I think there has not been enough”

attention on Lebanon which is absorbed as much of this war as anybody other than the Iranian people so thank you Kim for walking us through so much information in best of luck getting to the United States and if I could I just mention one last thing I've spent the last three years writing my next book which comes out in October and it is all about how we got here I go back to the 1980s

and and sort of you know unpack how the Iranian Revolution collided with the Israeli invasion of

Lebanon in 1982 and created this this dynamic of confrontation between the US and Iran with Israel in the middle of it and to watch it all unfold and and reach this this climax today with Benjamin Netanyahu saying I've dreamt of this war for 40 years he was Deputy Ambassador to Washington in 1982 to hear Lindsay Graham say we you know Lebanon the U.S. should also bomb his bullet in Lebanon and and avenge you know the 1983 bombing of of the Marines we need to get out of this cycle and I'm not sure

that we will but I can only hope that somehow we we come out on the other side with something a little bit more positive for the region well we will hope so we'll definitely look forward to having you back on when your book is at an October people should look watch for that as well so thanks for

that and thanks as always for your analysis thanks for having me thanks again to Kim for joining the show

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